First it was the MP3. Then it was
lots and lots of MP3s.... Now computer hard drives are rapidly filling up
and overflowing with movies and complete seasons of favourite TV programs. Suffice to
say, storage space is the one thing computers will
never have
enough of. Yet as hard drives slowly grow into single-digit Terabyte territory, a single architectural decision implemented years
ago makes it impossible for most PCs to even recognize HDDs larger than 2.1TB in size!

The 3TB Barracuda XT (model: ST33000651AS) is a 3.5"
desktop SATA III drive which uses Perpendicular Magnetic Recording technology, comes
with 64MB of onboard cache and supports Native Command Queing (NCQ). Beneath
its shiny metal exterior are five platters spinning at 7,200RPM, each with an
aerial density of 488Gb/in2. The drives' maximum sustained data rate is
pegged at 149Mb/s, average latency at a quick 4.16ms.

Put less simply, hard drives are split up into little sectors
called Logical Block Addresses (LBA). Each LBA sector is 512 bytes, and
if I've got this right, its particular location in the
partition is 'addressed' by a 32-bit value in the Master Boot Record
(MBR). According to nerds much smarter than I, the largest possible size of
a file in this environment is given to be 4,294,967,295 bytes. Thus by
multiplying 4,294,967,295 bytes by 512-byte sectors you get the limit
of 2,199,023,255,040 bytes - otherwise known as 2.19TB.

If you want to boot off a 3TB hard drive, it gets somewhat more
complicated....

Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 and Windows 7 support a new '4K advanced format'
Logical Block Address of 4096 bytes, which was introduced as an
industry standard in Jan 2011. However, to boot off a 3TB drive the computer
requires 1) not only a 4096 byte Long LBA capable operating system like Win 7
x64, 2) but a hard drive with a GUID Partition Table
(GPT) (legacy MBR partitions don't support this), 3) a Unified
Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) BIOS and 4) a HDD driver.

To circumvent ALL these challenges, Seagate supply a free program called
Disk Wizard with the 3TB Barracuda XT that gets around the
2.1TB limitation by essentially making any capacity beyond 2.1TB visible as a virtual
drive and partition.

This approach allows the Barracuda XT to be used in Windows XP/Vista/7 x64
and x32 operating systems, with UEFI or legacy BIOS motherboards. The only
concession you make is installing one bit of software and accepting that your
lovely 3TB drive is split up into 2.1TB and 0.8TB partitions.

Seagate's Solution to the 2.1TB Barrier -
DiskWizard

To get around the 2.1TB limit and open up the full 3TB of drive space
on the Seagate Barracuda XT ST33000651AS you'll need to install Seagate
DiskWizard. This application is coded up by Acronis and available here: http://www.seagate.com/beyond-2TB.

Before installing the Seagate DiskWizard software, the 3TB hard drive shows
up like this in the Windows 7, Disk Management console.

Once initialized, the full 3TB drive is broken down to a 2.19TB
partition which is accessible and a 0.8TB partition which is not. So to get around this
PCSTATS installed Seagate DiskWizard and let it rip on the 3TB Barracuda XT SATA III
hard drive. See what happens after the jump.